iOS Today Episode 597 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show. 

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchard and I take a trip into Apple Arcade to talk about some games we've been playing some games you should check out and some new games that you might not have heard of. So stay tuned

... (00:00:16):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:22):
This episode of iOS today is brought to you by ultimate ears fits ultimate ears fits are the world's most comfortable earbuds with premium sound and all day comfort. Use promo code iOS at ue.com/fits to get your pair and by Buck Mason, Buck Mason's clothes are second to none. Once you try Buck Mason, they'll become your go-tos too. Head over to Buck Mason.com/ios and get a free t-shirt with your first order. Here we are again for another episode of iOS today, this is the show where we talk all things. Ios TV V OS home pot OS watch OSI, pat OS look, it's all the OSS Apple has on offer, and we talk about them and how you can make the most of them here on iOS. Today. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent,

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:22):
And I'm Rosemary.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:25):
Hello, Rosemary. How are you today?

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:28):
I've been very unproductive this week, Mikah. You said Apple Arcade. So I went and spent like six hours playing games yesterday. I, I, I kind of forgot to put some show notes together, but we'll just wing it, right? It's fine.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:39):
Yeah. Yeah. We'll get there in the end. Yes, this look, Apple Arcade is Apple's subscription service for being able to play games that kind of fit a, a particular mindset. If you will. These games don't have any free to play mechanics where you have to watch ads or where you choose to watch ads in order to continue playing, or you have to wait a certain amount of time to play, or you pay to be able to continue playing. All of these games are made to be able to be played with this one subscription of 4 99 a month. On top of that Apple makes these games available to be played without needing a connection online. So you there's, there's some version of the game that should be able to be played without needing to connect to the internet. And that is kind of a, a privacy thing.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:30):
Some of the apps that exist outside of this will use kind of your activity, your actions to, to make a difference in or to, to be able to track you and kind of understand what you're doing. So Apple wanted to give, give folks the opportunity to play these games without having it kind of be a trade off there. So with that comes the continued addition or the continual addition of games to Apple Arcade to the library and that this is the opportunity now to kind of take a peek back inside the Apple Arcade library. See what's going there. You may have heard of some of these that we're gonna talk about. Some of them maybe new to you, or maybe these versions of the game are new to you. So without further ado Rosemary orchard, why don't you kick us off with your first pick from Apple Arcade?

Rosemary Orchard (00:03:25):
Well, my first pick is somewhat in honor of Dr. Duran, who is kind of you know, one of those nerds who you keep hearing about in Apple circles. And he is into many things, but when I actually had a conversation with him, he noted that he's in engineering. And when I came across bridge construction, plus in the app store, it just reminded me of him in some way. And I thought, I don't know, constructing bridges sounds like it could be a fun exercise. And the best part of bridge construction is you can create bridges and nobody actually dies if you get it wrong. So, you know, that's a definite whim right there. So bridge construction, you have various different areas that you need to unlock. And in order to unlock things, you need to create bridges. And so I'm starting over in west lines over on the left hand side, and what I've done is I've gone back and I've reset my first bridge so that I can easily construct this and to give people more of an idea of how you get started.

Rosemary Orchard (00:04:18):
And so you do to start with, is you have a gap between pieces of road on our one side, there is a black and white check of flag just like in the formula one at the end. And your aim is to get the trucks to the other side. Why did the truck cross to the other side, because you were building a bridge, that's why so to start with, you only have wood to build your bridge with and this is this being the first one they've given me a bit of a guide with an outline that I can just you know, put some things on. So I have to start at one of the white dots. And then from there I can draw to various points to create an actual bridge. Now it should be noted.

Rosemary Orchard (00:04:58):
The triangles are pretty good structurally. And so that's why I've gone with the triangles when you're done building your bridge, you can hit play and it'll come up. It might be green, or if you you've failed somehow. So for example, if I remove this, this top section it, it, it kind of goes yellow orange, and then red, if there's structural integrity, leggings lacking. So I'll put that back to, and then oops I will run some large vans over it and see what's happened. So you have a bridge a budget for every bridge that you're building. And your job is to stay under budget or, you know, on budget, if, if that's a possibility and you to get points for being under budget or extra points bonuses. And so when you've built your bridge, you can then continue onto the next one where it gets progressively more difficult.

Rosemary Orchard (00:05:47):
So I'm gonna pick one that I haven't done because as you continue it, it does get trickier. And what you can see here is I have a budget of 7,000. It does not specify which monetary units, so I'm assuming it's Somalians just like the Sims, but, you know, maybe, maybe it's not. But if I needed some help then I can tap on the light bulb in the top left and I can select to get a hint. And then it'll give me some outlines of dotted lines that I need to complete in order to, you know, make a structurally secure bridge. So as I go ahead and build things, then hopefully I will find out that I have made a lovely structurally strong bridge. So I'm just gonna try and put that together, pop this one in here. And I'm gonna guess that I need to do this over here as bridges are usually somewhat symmetrical.

Rosemary Orchard (00:06:41):
So I'm gonna hope that that is what I needed to do there and let's try. Oh, Nope, no, that was very, definitely not secure. I'm gonna need to do something else here, I guess maybe I can do that to increase the structural integrity. Nope. Possibly need to do something there. Eh, it could work, it could work. It's a little bouncy. We'll see whether or not the trucks make it. Hopefully they will. Yeah. That's not very secure. Is it? Well, yeah. Okay. I'm gonna have to go back and figure that one out, but the good news is there's still another hint waiting for me, so I will get to have some fun and hopefully not let some truck drivers drive, drive, die, driving over my bridges today, but they are virtual. So you know, it it's probably okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:25):
Yes, indeed. I, I hopefully it'll be okay for them in the end. All right. Yeah. Bridge construction, plus in the Apple Arcade area of the app store. The one I wanna talk about is one that folks may have heard about before maybe you didn't, haven't given it a try or maybe it's one of your favorite games in any case. I think one of the coolest games in Apple Arcade is cold, sneaky Sasquatch. Sneaky Sasquatch is a very cute game involving yes, you guessed at a Sasquatch. And essentially you are, it's a little bit like if you've ever seen Yogi bear, it's a little bit like Yogi bear in the sense that this character is kind of trying to do things outside of just being a Sasquatch in the forest. So I'm gonna start a new game, cause I don't wanna mess up the game that I have going.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:26):
And also because it shows kind of the introduction. So you get a little bit of the story of what's going on with Macia sneaky. So the Sasquatch comes out of its little house and oh my goodness. It's so hungry. To move your character, to move your Sasquatch, you simply can tap on the screen and drag your finger, your finger around to be able to move that Sasquatch. Oh, there's a bear down there. You can have a conversation with the bear. The bear is sleeping. So no convo there, it appears I can't eat those mushrooms on the ground. So I'm gonna, oh, I could talk to a, a raccoon. Let's see the raccoon says, HIA buddy, you look hungry. You should go to the campsite and grab a snack here, take one of these backpacks so you can carry stuff around.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:11):
Oh, I think I'll choose the green. One of course look and good says there're a, and now we head to the campsite with, oh, look at that gorgeous backpack. I kind of want that myself. Hey, you know, you're not allowed in the campground says the ranger you'll scare away all the campers. Oh no. What do I do? What does the sneaky squa do? Don't worry about that. Guy says the raccoon. We just have to be sneaky and now we're gonna follow the raccoon into the campground and we'll see what happens here. All right. So we are in the campground. It says let's open up this food box and see what's inside. This food box is a cooler that I'm now opening. Yes. Not only do you have to use the touch controls to move around, but also to open up the cooler, tap inside and pull out some sausages.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:06):
So I'll pick that up and put it into my backpack and looks like some ketchup that I'll put in there as well. And now I'm gonna close that cooler and walk away. That's a good snack right there, but don't eat it yet. That would be uncivilized. Follow me. I'll show you the proper way to eat it. So apparently there's a proper way to eat. The food, ah, looks like we're the a picnic table. It says, dump it on the table over here, then eat it. So I'll tap on the table, dump out the sausages and the ketchup, which I guess sneaky SAS watch is just going to eat in its entirety. And now we can enjoy the sausages as well. I'm not

Rosemary Orchard (00:10:43):
Sure plastic is good for your digestion like that. That, that feels like it. If my calls problems later,

Mikah Sargent (00:10:49):
I agree. Wow. You sure know how to eat. It's starting to get dark though. Let's head back and call it a day. So now that it's getting dark outside, I'm gonna follow the raccoon with the annoying voice back into the forest. And we've made it here and says, look over there. Oh my goodness. It's the ranger he's sleeping. We'll have to sneak by. So he won't hear us. You've got some gigantic footsteps, so you're gonna have to tiptoe. If he sees us, we'll be in big trouble. So let's practice. All right. So I'm gonna tap, tap, tap instead of tapping and holding to sneak past. You simply tap on the screen and you walk past the ranger and it looks like we, we got through, we're making our way back again to the campsite. I think now I can run. And I think probably, yeah, go back to my house.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:52):
Now, get some sleep before you pass out. I don't wanna have to carry you back to your house every night, but I will for a price. The record runs away and I, we can make it back to our house inside and take a sleep. So we'll go to bed because it's night and then come back to the daytime. One of the things about this game is that, although you start out in the no, no true spoilers here, but you start out in the woods and you don't stay. There is what I'll say. You end up going to other places you end up becoming a, the sneaky Sasquatch is sneaky in all sorts of ways, including kind of take over jobs that maybe once belonged to humans, the Sasquatch is filling those roles and trying to kind of make their way through through corporate life is, is the hint I'll give. So it's a very fun game with a, I think a, it's a really adorable story that has a lots of different stuff that you can, you can play. So that is sneaky Sasquatch which again, Apple Arcade 4 99 a month to be able to play this along with the other games that we're covering today as part of Apple Arcade, what's your next one, Rosemary.

Rosemary Orchard (00:13:10):
Well, my next one is based kind of a little bit on my love for Wordle and the fact that I've been in enjoying doing lots of word puzzles recently. And it's a great way to increase my vocabulary a little. So I went looking and I found SpellTower plus, which has a number of different essentially word search type options. So there's the terror, the puzzle and you, you need to play all of them at least once to, in to get to do everything. So you need to get a row or you get a row for every word that you make. So I, in this particular one, I need to try and make a word a word on every row I presume. And then it's gonna sort of Tetris or reverse Teris and that it's gonna increase what's on my screen.

Rosemary Orchard (00:13:53):
So I need to try and, and get some of these things off. And so, oops, I will try and get rid of two things or is that gonna be, Nope, that's not gonna help me. Well, I'm just gonna keep going here and see if I can try and get rid of some of the more complicated ones. Xs and Zs are always really difficult. And there are some letters which will come up and they'll have extra points if you include them. And so if I include this a here, so I'll use the word vast for that, then I get four extra points, which is pretty great. And I will use can I do ho it's too short? Darn it. So some of these will let you do three letter words and some of them will let you do some of them need at least four.

Rosemary Orchard (00:14:39):
I'm gonna see, does lead count as a word? It does. I am allowed to use lead. Excellent. which of course, you know, is you know a good word. And then I just basically have to keep going to see if I can you know finish this I am going to save and quit that one and I'll just show people the the search one which has a different scoring version. So each of the has different scoring methods. And basically in this one, there's a star in the middle. That is the letter that I really want to include in a good word. And the, the ELA letters would be great to include as well. And so I need something with an I in it. And there's a T N S a H and N and a, an E a D then E around it.

Rosemary Orchard (00:15:33):
Hmm. Can I, U can I do hints? I can probably do hints that's that's not a bad word. And so I got the star and that was the best word that I've, I've managed there because I, that was the first word I did. So there we go. Once you've done that there is daily search there's daily tower, kind of with leaderboard and so on. There's also some extra modes with Zen double puzzle bubble puzzle, et cetera allowing you to try and compete in various different ways. But if you just wanna have some fun, then you can just go into say, for example, the tower option and see how many words you can try to get. Now I should note yeah. Are a couple of different ways of selecting things. So I've just done this one by tapping, and then you double tap on the last letter to complete your word. But you can also do it by dragging. I found tapping a little bit easier, especially when you're dealing with diagonals, which are allowed and you can do crossing diagonals as well. Which is very nice if that is sort of thing, the, or thing that you like to be able to do in these word games.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:37):
Nice. That's yeah, I, that's a fun one. I, I love being able to do word searches and stuff like that. So,

Rosemary Orchard (00:16:45):
Yeah, my, my problem is always, I end up thinking of French and German words that I wanna include, and I put it in. It's like, no, you're not allowed this word. It's not a real word. It like, okay, you didn't specify. I had to be playing in English. Darn it.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:58):
Yeah. What what's going on there? Let me, there we go. It it's sometimes the, the mirror works and sometimes it doesn't, this is one of those cases where my clock was backwards, but it's not anymore. So we're good. All right. I think we will take a, a quick break before we come back with more I wanna tell you, I, I talked about this I think a couple of episodes ago, and I'm really excited to have them as a sponsor on the network. I think everybody should have a pair of the ultimate ears fits as they are bringing you this episode of iOS today, with how much we rely on our devices. It's easy to forget about the hardware that we're born with. You know, the, the ear just like fingerprints, no two ears are exactly alike.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:48):
And that's why, why your earbuds probably cause you some level of discomfort or even physical pain. After a while, I've heard people complain about, you know, they're wearing their earbuds and it starts to hurt their ears. They have to take them out. They can't keep them in for very long. The ultimate ears fits true wireless custom fit. Earbuds from ultimate ears are here to change that. I got a pair of ultimate ears fits in the mail. They sent some to me to check out and it's pretty cool. It comes to this box and inside there is the little charging case with a USBC woo port on the back. So you can plug in and charge and inside are your ultimate ears earbuds. Now these earbuds feature a, a special kind of, of silicone or, or a sort of moldable tip that go inside of your ears and that makes them so that they fit you perfectly.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:49):
It, this really fascinating process where in fact, one of the things that they say is, Hey, as soon as you open this up, you need to start the fitting process because they are essentially uncured tips, meaning that they haven't gone through the curing process to shape them yet and, and hold them in a certain specific shape. So you pop them into your ears, you do this special fit process that we're showing on screen now. And at the end of it, then they are molded to fit your ears and your ears in particular. It's kind of a, it's kind of a fun process to go along with because it it's sort of playing music along the way as it's curing tips inside of your ears. And so you, you get to kind of jam out and make sure that the base sounds good, that kind of thing.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:34):
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Mikah Sargent (00:20:35):
For over 25 years, it's engineered to provide a full warm sound with a tight punchy, low end, and you can set custom EQ presets through the app too. So if you're not happy with the engineered sound, then you can make adjustments to that play and pause music and answer calls with the built in controls and use the free app to set custom actions like your voice assistant volume adjustment and more. And what I love is that one of them fit perfectly in my ear, but the other one was not quite right. It was falling out. And so there's a, in the app, there's kind of a process that you can do. What ends up happening at the end is they recommend, you know, how to fix it. And the way that it was recommended to fix it for me was a pair of smaller of these these special, multiple tips.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:18):
And they sent them to me for free. Again, it's a guaranteed perfect fit in 60 seconds. And they, they backed that guarantee. They sent me the replacements that were smaller. I popped it into the, the right one and did the fit process. And then it fit perfectly. Our ear canals are very unique. If you're fit, if you try your fits and you don't love them as much as we all have I know that Leo is also pretty happy with his, no worries. Years offers a 30 day money back guarantee. Plus you're gonna get free shipping free returns and a one year warranty. Whether you use one device all day, or you switch between several it's important to find tools that fit your routine so you can stay productive. Use the promo code ios@uedotcomslashfitssupereasytorememberue.com slash fits to get your pair of UEFI promo code iOS that's u.com/fits.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:14):
And don't forget to use that promo code iOS to let them know that I sent you there. As I was talking about those very cool earbuds on today's episode, thank you, ultimate ears. And let us get back to the show. This next app that I wanna talk about is a ver it's very much kind of an, an idol app, but it is a lot of fun. If you like to sort of, if you like the Sims you may like this one. It is, it's a very simple game. Although you can play it in survival mode, that makes it a little bit more difficult but you are basically just creating a world. So I'm gonna choose start new game, and we're gonna name our world. Maybe, oh, there we go. Ios today. What an interesting game for a world.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:07):
And now we are loading. Its is hi, welcome to pocket build. Let's show you the basics of the game. First let's teach you how to build open the build menu and select the fence. Great. Now let's just close up the fence, press the confirm button to build it. So I'll hit the checkbox to confirm checkbox, to confirm and checkbox, to confirm. Now, you know how to build felt good, right? Some items will require resources to build. Let's teach you how to gather resources, press the command icon. To open up the human profile. I'm gonna have this human finding wood you have now commanded your human to go and find wood. They will run to the nearest tree and start chopping wood. You can add trees to collect wood, or you can add crops to collect food. You can also spawn more humans from the build menu.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:49):
You can also control your character, collect resources and explore the world in first person. So here I am now the character itself and I'm chopping this tree and now I've got wood. The world you build is fully 3d, meaning you can view from various angles, use two fingers to swipe up down and change the camera angle. So now I've got I'm zooming in and zooming out and I've got the ability to kind of view from a bird's eye view or from the side and rotate to get it exactly how I want. As I just said, rotates user thumb and indexing finger to rotate the camera, or I was just using my index finger and middle finger suite. Now, you know how to control the camera? Let's reset the camera. So that's now reset. Those are just the basics. If you need some inspiration, take a look at some of our featured worlds or go to the website, moon bear.com for more great resources.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:40):
So now that I've got this world, and again, I'm playing in sandbox mode, so I've got limited resources to use. I can tap the build menu and I can check out some of the items like big Ben if I wanted to. So let me drop big Ben into this world, not entirely in an acronym rather. So we'll drop that there and use this. You can, you can change the size of big Ben by scale or we can rotate big Ben. But I'm just gonna go ahead and drop it where it is. We don't need two big bends. Just one is fine. So now big Ben is in our map, but let's see what else there is. There's some props from London, including a phone box, some lights road signs. We can add tiles. So these are kind of your basic ground tiles.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:34):
And then once you're doing it, you have options to kind of change colors, shapes, sizes change, choose larger plots of land so that you can make sure that it is kind of whatever you're trying to build. If you want to kind of build it faster, then you can choose larger plots to be able to do that. And then the final area are for edges. So as you can see back on my map here in order to have drawn those edges, you have to use those edge pieces there. Again, fences that could added including pathways, bridges, and stairs entrances and supports full on buildings. So if you just wanted to drop a house on your property, you could there's all sorts of, of themes for these. So modern homes, Western homes, farm homes, miscellaneous homes. I believe there's also yeah, birdhouse TPEs homes from ancient Egypt and homes from China, I think is the idea there.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:42):
We've also got all sorts of trees and crops. You can also add gold pieces that basically generate gold plants, including some mushrooms and trees, grass there's coral for the for the water, or if you wanted to make like a, you know, an ocean world as well, some pots rocks and mounds look, the point is there are lots and lots and lots and lots of different options to add stuff to your camp. And on top of being able to add props, you can add people and animals and things like that. So we've got, you know, a lady elf, a Knight a princess, a king, a wizard, a zombie farmer, a businessman, if you're making kind of a more modern place disco man. Oh, I'm definitely adding disco man to my city. So I will drop disco man onto the property and let's see what disco man does.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:41):
I don't know if disco man just starts dancing or what let's see explore stands still. Okay. So it appears that let's just have disco man Explorer. So disco man's looking around and maybe if I added a, a dance club, then disco man would go in and dance, but there are also options to add things like giants. So why don't we add a Wharf giant to the map and see what happens? And we can change, ah, look, this one can dance. There goes the dwarf giant doing, doing a little jig. If you will, there's also the option to rampage where the dwarf giant will go around and destroy the buildings that you've, and also rampage against the humans that you have. There are things like monsters and dragons fish. You can add to your water and butterflies, which can fly around.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:36):
It looks like these require some sort of some sort of barrel purchase. I don't really know what that is, but it appears I'm able to drop it. So now I've got butterflies flying around, which is nice. And tapping anywhere on the map will obviously let you make edits. So it's very easy to create a beautiful world. And this game also has the ability to kind of share with other people. So you can see share a screenshot of your world, but there's also, so you can publish your world. I can also make it night. Just so you see what that looks like or auto day and night where it switches back and forth and the camera, oh, there there's director mode. So you can kind of get a sweep of your world as well as the ability to stack items on top of each other. That is, let me go back that is pocket build. Plus pocket build is also available in the app store on its own. That's the original version that I had. I was super pumped to see it coming come to Apple Arcade as a game there, because then you can get all of the fun features that it has right in Apple Arcade. All right. Rosemary, tell me about your next Apple Arcade.

Rosemary Orchard (00:29:52):
Well, my next Apple Arcade game, there's several of them like this. And so this one is my young Titan plus and I should know that plus Deion in the app store for Apple or cake games usually means that that game is also available for purchase separately, directly from the developer. And there may even be a free version available as well, which is the case for my young Titan, I believe. But my young, if you've not played it before is essentially a matching game with tiles only. It takes it to another level, literally in that you can have multiple layers of tiles on top of each other. So once I match, for example, these two leaves together. I revealed two tiles underneath which allows me to continue with the matching. This is a very simple, my young game.

Rosemary Orchard (00:30:37):
There are some options which are quite nice. You can change for example, the back ground, add to various different ones. So if I wanted a nice Mica green, then I could have that. I can also change which tile set. So for example, if I struggle to recognize the standard tile set, because maybe I'm not very good at differentiating, differentiating between Chinese characters. Then I could switch to say fruit and then continue with the fruit. So I've got some star fruit here and then there's an Apple that looks like a passion fruit, no pomegranate, it's a pomegranate. I'm really not very good at remembering the names of different fruits. Especially when I'm podcasting live on. Now, there's also some prawns in here. I don't think prawns are fruit unless I'm very much mistaken Mica. You know, tomato's, I, I understand that that being a thing because they contain sea, which makes them by definition a fruit, but sushi, sushi is not a fruit.

Rosemary Orchard (00:31:27):
Why is there sushi in my fruit tile set, but either way, this is a very nice game. It's nice to sit. You can also control whether or not there is music and sound. As you can see, I've got these turned off. You can also turn on and off showing the free tiles. So if I turn off showing free tile, it kind of just looks like everything is available and it's up to me to know whether or not I can choose something. So you know that that's an option that you can use to make it more or less difficult if you want to, you can also show the time remaining available. And of course you do get some extra points. If you manage to complete this one, it really quickly I am not going to complete this in record time, because obviously I've been talking to you to you the listener and Mikah as well as well.

Rosemary Orchard (00:32:11):
I do this, but I have complained the entire board and I got no hints. And I did not have to shuffle the board, which is something else you can do as well. So if you get stuck, then you can have all the tiles shuffled to give you another different view of the, the deck or the board so that you can attempt to solve your, your problem that way. It's a very simple game. It's a nice one to just sit there and you know, play well, listening to music or something ideal while say waiting at a doctor's surgery or similar or on hold on the phone as I used it earlier today. But it's a nice, simple game that I love to have in my pocket.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:49):
Nice, nice. The next one that I will talk about is an oldie, but a Goodier real oldie, but a goodie. And it is one that I had fun playing for quite a while. And they continue to add new adventures and new kind of themes for this game. It's the Oregon trail. So this is a modern reimagining of the Oregon trail. I believe I've actually talked about it on the show before. It might have been my pick of the week one week my, my app cap. But essentially what this lets you do and I'll choose new game is play all sorts of versions of the Oregon trail. That also now include the ability to play as native American characters in Oregon trail, which was not an option in the original version of the game. I'm gonna skip the prologue because we I've played this before. But see, this is one of those options. You have the option to share online if you want to. But again given that it's an Apple Arcade game, you do don't have to play that through. These are some new, as I said, they're always updating it with new additions and, and new kind of tweaks to make the game better. And let us go on just a quick journey. So I think one of the better ones let's see

Mikah Sargent (00:34:26):
We'll do the prologue just so you can kind of see how this works. So it's just one leg of a journey. So we'll tap start journey and it will take us to the Oregon trail. The year is 49 and a trio of immigrants has become stranded on their way to independence. The very beginning of the Oregon trail, our wagon is stuck. We're low on supplies, and I think my leg is broken. If we don't get help soon, we're done for

Mikah Sargent (00:34:57):
Someone approaches on a horse and says, well, it isn't a party of stranded greenhorns. My name is Moses Harris, pleasure to be of assistance. Now let's take a look at what we're dealing with here. And Moses steps off the horse and looks at the folks on the ground and Moses says, looks like you've got some injuries who's in worse shape. And then it says, who should Moses Harris examine the there's Julia and there's David. They are both on the ground. But it looks like Julia is holding her arm. So it's possible that Julia has a broken arm. Let's find out I'll tap examine. Julia. Julia says, I'm a carpenter. I'm usually good at repairing wagons, but my arm is broken. Oh, who guessed it? Should Julia be treated with medicine? I can reconsider and choose someone else. I'm gonna go ahead and treat Julia with medicine and see what happens.

Mikah Sargent (00:35:50):
So Moses treated Julia with medicine and says, medicine can be used to restore health and help recover from illness or injuries like a broken arm. You're looking better already. Greenhorn says, Moses, you better get that wagon moving again. The rain kind of clears up a little bit and says, well, what are you waiting for? If it is it isn't going to fix itself, you know? So you sort of shout to get the, like, get this wagon fixed. They work together to get the wagon fixed. They jump for joy as the wagon is fixed. And Moses says it's an improvement, but you should really take better care of your wagon in the future. Where are you going anyway? We're gonna go to independence. Ah, yes. Independence. The beginning of the famous Oregon trail. It's not far from here and I'm heading that way myself.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:36):
What do you say? You join me? We're saved, says the group and they have a morale boost as they start to walk their way toward the Oregon trail. Moses says something smells good. And the group says things are looking up, although they do look a little bit dragged as they approach the first stop along the way to independence, it says the pleasant scent of frying, garlic and onion reaches the party long before the light of the cooking fires, a generous traveler says, well, I'll be, if it isn't Moses Harris still have still save in travelers on the trail. I see you look to be in a bad way. I'd be willing to sell you some supplies. If you're interested. It it's a good deal. Just $30, $30. Sorry. That was my saying in this economy Harris says, go ahead.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:27):
Greenho saving money is only useful if you like, if you live to spend it in exchange for their money, the woman hands over some tool boxes, some clothes, some coffee and a harmonica. I should teach you how to use supplies. Let's try repairing your wagon first and you can use those tool boxes to repair your wagon. So you open the inventory, you move over to your wagon and you can see there are some red squares and an orange square red squares are holes in your wagon. And if you, if items are on those holes, they will fall out onto the ground. So those are the ones you wanna repair. First, an orange square is going to become a red square at which point, then it will an item will fall out. So I'll tap on the toolbox. I'll choose repair and then choose the red squares to get rid of those.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:13):
I pro tip, I like to stock up on tool boxes quite a bit, cuz then you don't have to worry about things. Getting lost clothes will help with, with your overall hygiene, which keeps you from getting sick. Coffee is an energy booster and harmonics are for raising your morale. I know about all those I'm gonna choose, continue, continue. And the generous traveler says, you look to be in much better shape. Now, glad I could help. You're welcome to stay at, stay a while. If you'd like to rest and the woman invites the group to join them for a meal. So they all sit down and enjoy a meal together. And then they, you can see that plus one party health because they ended up getting food. That is the Oregon trail. That's just a very small tidbit of the Oregon trail. It's a lot of fun to play through the whole thing. Try and see if you can get your characters to the end, lots of different options for who you bring on the party and what they provide. It's it's a survival game and it's quite a bit of fun resource management, survival, that kind of thing. Alright. Rosemary, tell us about your last Apple Arcade game.

Rosemary Orchard (00:39:18):
Well, my last Apple Arcade game is something I'm sure a lot of people are gonna love it's Sonic dash because you know who doesn't love to be a hedgehog and just run around the world. Possibly literally there's a couple of different places I've been so far. So as you play Sonic dash, you're running around, you need to try and collect coins rescue animals, and you also need to take some stuff out if it is gonna attack you. Those are some bombs I think either way not good. So I'm gonna try attacking this one and oh, I need to jump because otherwise I'm gonna jump into those spikes or run into those spikes and that would be very much not good for me. So yeah, essentially you just need to run around and try and do all the things so that you can get points.

Rosemary Orchard (00:40:01):
And as we all know, points mean prizes saving animals also gives you points, which is great. So you can hopefully do something decent with that. And then you also get to jump very high up into the air and do some potentially cool stunts which it will show you how to do occasionally. I was doing sweats in the air earlier as I prepped for the show, which was lots of, of fun. I'm gonna try, oh no, I, I failed. I, I ran into the boxes or I tried to jump over the boxes and apparently I should have gone around because I am Sonic, but I am not super Sonic yet, but maybe, maybe by the time, next time we talk about Apple Arcade, I will be super S Sonic, I guess we'll find out

Mikah Sargent (00:40:43):
Indeed. The last one, I just wanna give an honorable mention to we don't have time for a demo today, but I did wanna talk about a newer game. It's called Gibbon beyond the trees. And it's kind of an endless runner game where you play a given that is swinging through the trees. It's a gorgeous looking game. It's a gorgeous sounding game. And it's got a great mechanic that you can play on an iPad, an iPhone wherever it's just some simple tapping options to kind of keep pulling yourself along. And the aim developers actually tried to, to the best of their ability match the actual physics and mechanics of how Gibbons swing through trees in real life in creating this game, there's a name for it. The particular sort of phenomena of, of physics that the that the Gibbons use.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:42):
But I, I can't recall it off the top of my head in any case as I said, a really gorgeous game to, to play sounds amazing. And it's a lot of fun and simple to kind of get hang on things as you are playing through. And I guess that is a bit of a of a, a pun, if you will. All right, folks that brings us to the end of the Apple Arcade walkthrough or tour of some of the games that we like to play, or some of the newer games that are there on the platform, again for 4 99 a month to check out Apple Arcade. If you haven't claimed your free trial yet, if or if you have claimed your free trial already, if you haven't claimed your free trial, yet, check it out for free and play a bunch of games to see if it's worthwhile for you so many different games. And if you're part of a family plan, then everybody can play the games in Apple. Arcade is part of your family subscription. So that's nice as well. All right, let's

Rosemary Orchard (00:42:40):
Take a quick something. Oh, go ahead. I was gonna say it's something I've recommended to my parents when they've been traveling before that they pay for Apple Arcade for, for a month, because then it's $5, but they've got all the games and they all work offline, which is great on planes, whether or not you are paying for the wifi connection, which will certainly cost you more than the Apple Kate subscription.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:59):
Yes, that is a really pro tip. All right. We will take a quick break before we come back with the news shortcuts corner. And of course our app caps this episode of Iowa today is brought to you by Buck Mason. I talked about Buck Mason on this show and I was wearing at the time a shirt that was a Buck Mason shirt. We all have our favorite go-tos right. You know, you've got your favorite shirts, your favorite sweater, your favorite jeans, the stuff you wear all the time. Well, you may find that Buck Mason provides you with your favorite go-tos Buck Mason's clothes are second to none because they are the, the clever thing about Buck Mason is that they've chosen styles that are timeless. These styles are ones that you can count on no matter what, you know, by keeping it to these kind of these simple choices, you can make sure that yeah, I mean is a t-shirt that has a nice hammer line going to go out of style.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:57):
No, is a button up shirt with pockets going to go out of style. No, these things are going to be able to last you a long time. That's the other thing they are really good quality, meaning that they will last you a long time. What's nice is, you know, you check out the sizing chart and in doing so, you can make sure that you get this size that's right for you. That way it will fit you right outta the box. And no matter how many times you wash it, it's gonna continue to fit. It's gonna fit you perfectly, exactly how you want it to Buck Mason makes all the essentials, they've got jeans, they've got shirts, they've got jackets. So it's all the stuff you're after. And of course, one of the best things is that they've got this really nice tailored look and fit for their t-shirts.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:41):
So that if you, you know, you wear them a lot, you wash them. They're going to look just as tailored as they were on day one. The curved hem tee is one of their most popular items and GQ loves it as much as, as we do here at TWI and calls it the best t-shirt in the game with good reason that really nice curved hem looks so nice. It just it looks very good the way that it, it drapes and, and sort of fits against a of pants. Buck Mason sent me some, some clothes to check out including my now favorite pair of sweatpants. They've got a nice sort of pairing between a there's a hoodie, a hooded sweatshirt, and a pair of sweatpants. And I got them both in the same color. So I've got this whole kind of sweatsuit that is so comfortable and you can, it's very durable, very high quality stuff.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:36):
There in fact is the hooded sweatshirt that I have with these huge drawstring drawstrings around the hood, which I like nice, nice, long drawstrings that you can really make adjustments with and you put it on and you're like, oh, wow. Now I, I understand now this really high quality material the, the, you know, the, the panels that come together to make the clothing, it's not just kind of a one piece of cloth that they've Laly sewn on either end. No, they they've, they've tailored these things. They've made them fit and finish, and you can really tell that that's the case. Once you try Buck Mason, they'll become your go-tos too. Head over to Buck Mason.com/ios and get a free t-shirt with your order. That's B U C K M a S O n.com/ios to get a free t-shirt with your first order buck, mason.com/ios.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:28):
Of course you can Google Buck Mason and get there, but we really ask, please use that you URL Buck Mason.com/ios by doing so you help us out by letting them know that you heard it here. And you said, oh, Mikah was talking about these this, these sweatpants, and I wanna get a free t-shirt. So I used that URL buck, mason.com/ios. Thank you, Buck Mason for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. All right. Back to this, I am very sad. One of my favorite apps deliveries, I've talked about deliveries before. I know Rosemary's a parcels fan parcel fan, but I, I use deliveries it's especially good for people in the United States as a delivery tracking app. And this app made by the folks at June is a simple app for tracking items that you are getting from Amazon, from FedEx, from ups, from USPS.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:24):
Basically you copy the tracking number from whatever service you pop it into deliveries and deliveries will keep track of the item every step along the way they show you this nice map showing where your package is gone. It's one of my favorite ways to keep track of Apple devices. So I was able to know, okay, here's where my Mac studio is right now and how long it'll be intelligent, get it, et cetera, et cetera. Deliveries put out a blog post over on June cloud talking about the uncertain future of the app. Essentially saying that as things as, as the process continues, as, as life goes on the different delivery services, FedEx ups, et cetera, are in many ways closing off the functionality of their tracking services for third party platforms. So what does all that mean?

Mikah Sargent (00:48:21):
If you're going, what is third party PLA? What basically the way that deliveries works is by talking to FedEx, talking to ups, by talking to the United States postal service behind the scenes, in order to pull that information that tells you, oh, this is where my package is. This is where it's going. This is how long it's gonna take to get there, et cetera. And unfortunately they, these companies you know, obviously deliveries doesn't make it clear, which ones are, which ones aren't are making it less possible for deliveries to be able to communicate with these services behind the scenes and say, Hey, tell me what's going on. And instead want you to use their apps, their services, to track these items. And it's no surprise I have over time kind of felt this and not, not sort of front of mind wise, but in the back of my mind, because I was just, after I read this article the other day, I had this realization of like, I have the FedEx app installed on my phone.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:24):
I have the ups app installed on my phone. I have us PSS informed delivery installed on my phone, even though I have delivery. Why is that? Well that's because they, at this point in many cases provide functionality that I can no longer get using deliveries or using another package tracking app. And that is because they want you to be using their services, their systems. And also because any work that they do on what's called the API, that is for folks who don't know, the thing that I was talking about the behind the scenes way of communicating is money spent. And if they don't see it justified to spend that money, then they are, and looking for ways to cut costs, then not messing with the API is one of the ways to not worrying about the API anymore is one of the ways to kind of cut costs. So, yeah, I'm, I'm bummed. I'm, I'm curious if parcel feels the same way and is not saying, you know, that that's the case yet.

Rosemary Orchard (00:50:24):
Yeah. Yeah. Parcel has got direct integration, for example, with Amazon, if you sign into your Amazon account and the way it's doing that is best I can tell. And this is speculation on my part is essentially it's scraping the webpage on a regular basis from your account, from your orders with, with Amazon. So that, that's how it gets the information. And there is one thing that I would say because technically yes development costs money. And so doing things like keeping an API up to date and so on costs money, but it doesn't need to cost any more money than just running FedEx. They could be consuming their own API to do things like run their website and run their, their apps and things like that. There is no reason that says that they have to have separate internal and external ones.

Rosemary Orchard (00:51:07):
So I do think it is just a case of, we don't want third party developers to be able to compete with us and keep track of things because also you know, I'm sure there are some people out there who enterprising as they are using it to track thousands of parcels that they're sending on a weekly basis and automatically putting claims for any that have been delayed instead of having a person to it manually. But you know, I, I think that it's a real shame that this is happening to deliveries, and I really wish that you know, all develop all delivery companies would just let you track things in whatever way you like. For me, it's just incredibly helpful to be able to just keep track of, for example, Kickstarter that I backed, which I, I know it's gonna ship, but I don't yet have a tracking number.

Rosemary Orchard (00:51:51):
That's something I can do in deliveries. I can put it in. And then when I get the tracking number, I can update it. That's not something I can do with FedEx, because I don't know if it's gonna ship with FedEx. And quite frankly, FedEx, isn't that popular over here in the UK anyway. At least when it comes to consumer stuff. So I guess we've just gotta wait and see and hope that maybe some of these people change their minds or the people making these decisions, realize that maybe actually save a buck in consumer and API and make it available to other people.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:23):
Yeah, I agree. Alright. Let's move along. Apple is making an update in the next version of iOS 15 that basically renames iTunes pass. Like what is iTunes pass? These days? I don't, I, why, what, who iTunes, who, so that is finally getting a change to make it your Apple account card instead of your iTunes pass card.

Rosemary Orchard (00:52:54):
Yes. Yeah. I think it's just one of those things where iTunes has been rebranded. It still exists on windows just about but it's, it's not around anymore, so it makes sense to rename it. And I don't know, maybe this will help with some of the confusion of when bought like app store gift cards versus Apple gift cards and tried to use one for the other and it didn't work. And so on and so forth, who knows. But it's, it's being renamed and that's, that's probably about time.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:26):
I agree. It yeah, that, I think that was more like a, oh right. We forgot about that.

Rosemary Orchard (00:53:31):
Need

Mikah Sargent (00:53:31):
To make a change to that. Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard (00:53:33):
Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:34):
What's this next one about watching out for Phish emails? Tell us about that.

Rosemary Orchard (00:53:38):
Yeah. So this is more of a, just general general, like keep an eye out because if you about, if use the Apple mail app on your iPhone or iPad, it will warn you at the top of the email, if it thinks that something is Phish or spam and, and just attempt to be careful, but essentially MailChimp, which is a service that is used to send lots of newsletters, lots of different companies use them. They got hacked. And so you probably just wanna keep an eye for email that you receive, even if it is from somebody who you have subscribed to just to make sure that it is very definitely you know, what is expected. I'd like to take this moment to remind people that if you tap and hold on a link on iOS, then it will show you what is behind that without opening it first.

Rosemary Orchard (00:54:24):
So I'm just gonna open the at TWI app to show people how to the TWI website. So if I tap and hold, for example, on schedule here, then I can actually see at the top where this is linking to, and it is linking to twi.tv which is good because a lot of people do put, you know bad links in emails. Obviously they're not gonna be on the TWI website are developers are on top of that, making sure that that is not gonna be compromised, but just keep an eye out and tell your friends and relatives to keep an eye out on their emails that they're receiving as well. And if they get anything that seems suspicious, yeah. Maybe, maybe just keep an eye maybe don't, don't click on it and go see what else is available.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:05):
Yes. now this, this little bit of rumor is a fascinating one. Apple appears to have accidentally revealed things to a support document online the, a, a wireless, not a wireless charger, a USBC charger that it could be releasing soon. This is a USB SAR. Let me try that again. This is a dual USBC charger which would be the first one from the company to have two ports on it. 35 Watts of charging and interestingly Apple if this is indeed going to be released, Apple has put the, the two charging ports side by side, and it also comes with a fold down prong to, to actually plug into the wall similar to the MacBook pro style brick chargers of, of yesterday year. So this is, this is fascinating. Oh, and so the nine to five Mac article did not have the actual image of it. But there was, let me see if I can find now that link so we can show you what it appears the the actual device will look like based on what what the person found online. So yeah, I'm having trouble finding it. It is

Rosemary Orchard (00:56:32):
Back world. I believe it was I'm just putting the link in the chat. Excellent for folks. So yeah, it, it, it looks like it's it it's different other to USBC port chargers in the respect that, you know, these, these, these are adjacent to one another. And so stacked on top of one another. Normally if you have multiple ports, then they're stacked. So like each port is horizontal, but you'll have them in a, in a, in a vertical line. And this, this is different, which is good. I'm curious as to you know, Apple finally releasing this now, because I know this is a frequent complaint for travelers that they can't use Apple chargers because it's only got one us, B, C port on it, or it's only got one port on it, let alone USBC or us B a or whatever it is.

Rosemary Orchard (00:57:19):
And so I'm, I'm glad to see Apple doing this. Personally, I'm, I'm still per probably gonna stick with my combination of CEI anchor, et cetera, chargers, because right. I've already got those and they've already got all the ports on them, but for somebody, for people, like, for example, my parents who don't have as many devices as I do or travel with as my devices, as I do this would be a great thing for them to just have especially, you know, for people that have a tendency to keep a phone charger or similar in their bag this would be an excellent upgrade for, for them, because then they can charge two things. And it's always nice to be able to make a friend when you're charging things, I've done that in the airports before somebody's had like, you know, what, those old five, what iPhone chargers plugged in, and I've been able, Hey, do you mind if I plug my charger in and you can plug into my charger and it's good charge your device faster, it's faster. I've never had anybody say no to that. And they've always been pleasantly surprised when their phone charges ridiculously quickly in comparison to the five wa that they've been they've experienced before. So yes, this is a, a great thing that Apple, hopefully fingers cross will really soon.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:26):
I agree. It's also interesting that there are the divots on the side that is not a hundred percent Apple style.

Rosemary Orchard (00:58:34):
Well, this is the same as the 20 Watts USBC charger that you would get with the home pod right now the home PODD mini it's the same as the one that comes in the box there, except for the fact there's got a second port on the bottom by the looks of it. And that also fingers crossed means that just like that USB sea charger and the original Apple watch charger, it'll have folding prongs here in the UK as well, which is a rarity.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:56):
Yeah. I I've read that. Those are pretty rare. Yeah, that's good that you'll, you'll have those all right. Folks that brings us to the end of the news segment. And I believe I can hear the music for shortcuts corner. This is shortcuts corner. The part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and Rosemary orchard, the shortcuts expert provides a response before we get into the shortcuts corner requests, though, there is a little news item that I thought you would want to talk about. I know I saw Matthew Castelli jumping for joy about this. So tell us what's changed in shortcuts.

Rosemary Orchard (00:59:39):
Well, this changes actually it's shortcuts related, but it's technically shortcuts for the Mac because a while ago, shortcuts on iOS got support, or rather the iWork apps on iOS got support for shortcuts with being able to open documents and do things like append a road to a numbers sheet, for example, and now short iWork on the Mac has also brought shortcuts automation support with the ability to open documents, create documents open presentations in rehearsal or show mode, for example, add adding rows to the top or the bottom of a table for numbers, which is great. I'm glad to see more and more of the stock, Apple apps adding support for these. And it's, it's lovely to, to know that more and more things are coming there. So if you have been looking at shortcuts on the Mac and going, Hmm, I, I dunno, I wanna like create a pages document and I can't do that. Take another look with the latest release of pages and the entire I work suite. You are able to do that.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:37):
Nice. That is fun. And I, yeah, I, when I saw that I'm like, oh boy, those folks are gonna know some great things to do with these. All right. The first request comes in from Victor, Victor Wrights. Hello there, Rosemary and Mica. I am curious if shortcuts for iOS can assist me in more easily creating and publishing a new post to a J blog. My current workflow is a template in bear, which I copy and paste into a new note, fill in the appropriate front matter or post content, then export to files as a markdown document, and finally publish using working copy. An ideal shortcut would display a series of text fields, which I could use to fill in the PostIt date and time category tags and URL for length list, style posts, and then populate the corresponding front matter. Is this or something remotely close to this even possible to achieve? Thank you kindly really enjoy the show each week. Love to your mothers, Victor. Thank you, Victor. Rosemary, it looks like there's a link in the show notes. So you got something.

Rosemary Orchard (01:01:39):
Oh, yes. I've got something. So I did just wanna say to Victor that one application, I definitely recommend for looking at things like this and specifically for writing blog posts actually drafts because the automation support in drafts for text is amazing, but you asked for shortcuts, so I've done shortcuts. And so I will just pop, open my iPhone here and quickly go to the right shortcut, which I have cool made in advance of the show. So I've got AJE post shortcut here. And I just wanna give a little bit of a background about Jel for people who are going wait, I, I don't really understand what's going on here. Maybe they have maybe you've used WordPress before. Maybe you have no idea. Essentially, every single post that you put on AJE website is just a text file.

Rosemary Orchard (01:02:25):
And at the top you've got three dashes and then you've got a series of keys and values. And so for example, title would be key, and then you have Colan and then you'd have whatever the title, the blog post is same with the date categories and so on and so forth. Now, categories, tags are a little special because they're, they are a array of tech of words, but that's a problem I'm gonna leave to solve for Victor because obviously Victor knows Victor's both best. But what I've done here is I have put together some things where we've got a list. And Victor said something interesting, which was that the URL may or may not actually be something that he wants to include. So I've put together title, date, category URL. You can add text to this by just tapping, add new item and then typing in text.

Rosemary Orchard (01:03:13):
And then when you run the shortcut, it will pop up and ask you, which of these you want to include. So if you don't want to a URL or a category, for example, you can uncheck those. So I'm actually going to leave this with the title, the date and the text, and then I'll tap done. And then it's gonna ask me for the title. So I can say, hello world is my title and tap done. And then date, and this, you should probably input a proper, fully format to date, but I'm just gonna put in tomorrow for the time being and then text. And I will just put in hello com comma and then world again, because that's the example I'm going with today. And then I've chosen to create a draft with this and I'm running the beter of drafts, but this is what I've output as the result.

Rosemary Orchard (01:03:59):
So we've got the time. So we've got the date and we've got the tags. Now, of course, there is a flaw in this, in that the date didn't have a date picker. And so what you could do is you could have a separate ask for input. And instead of asking for text, ask for a date, and then just input that in here separately, that's a possibility, it depends on what it is you want to do for my own personal DEC blog. I've got a system which I've set up in drafts where I can get all the tags and the categories, so I can choose from those. But that is something that you would then need to customize your blog for, which might be something that you're a poor Victor might not be either way, feel free to get back in touch with us, to find out a little bit more about that, if you want to.

Rosemary Orchard (01:04:44):
The other thing that I've done is I went diving on the internet because of course I did, and I have found a blog post it's from 2019, but it's still accurate and still works today on publishing two jackle from your iPad using shortcuts which we will include a link to in the show notes, because I think that the, that will probably be quite useful. It uses working copy to publish to your, the GitHub repo, where hopefully your your blog is stored making that nice and easy, but there we go. That should be the solution fingers crossed.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:19):
Nice. That's fantastic. And of course, again, link will be in the show notes. One more, this one comes from Doug. Doug says, good afternoon. I love your show and really enjoy the interplay between you two. Thanks, Doug. I would love my phone to go mute to, well, lemme try that again. I would love my phone to mute while in meeting. I know I can do this by manually flipping the mute switch, but I would rather this happen automatically. I do not want to disable all notifications. I, as I want to see the notifications, as they appear on my screen during a meeting, I just don't want the phone to make any noise or vibration. I'm not a strong shortcut of automation user, but I have looked for something like this, but have, have had no luck finding it yet. Thank you of all you do, especially Rosemary. I know podcasting is not Rosemary's main gig, and I really appreciate you being so generous with your time appearing on several shows that I enjoy listening to. I agree. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Thank you. So do you have some thoughts for, for Doug for this one?

Rosemary Orchard (01:06:12):
Yes, I do. And this is one of those things where I looked at a bunch of options, including focus mode modes, because what you can do with a focus mode is if you're in an event and you go to turn on a focus mode, then I can say turn this on until the end of this event. And that's something that is easy to do, but that doesn't actually turn off the volume and it's potentially is gonna limit the areas different notifications that come through depending on how you configure things. And the problem that we have on the phone specifically is this little guy on the side, which is this physical silence switch, and that is intended to be there. And it's deliberately a physical switch so that, you know, just by glancing at the outside of your device, whether or not you are in silent mode or not.

Rosemary Orchard (01:07:02):
So the best solution that I've come up with is not a good one, unfortunately. And that is using a shortcuts action to set the volume to 0%, but that is not necessarily going to affect the right volume for you. So my personal recommendation for you, Doug is actually going to be, to have a look at the focus modes and play with those because that is going to be much easier to automatically enable. I know that what I've done for example, on my Mac, especially when I'm presenting, I have various different things that I, I turn on or off. And one of them, I use an Apple bunch and it runs a shortcut, which on my presenting focus modes, so that when I'm actually, you know, screen sharing or something it disables a whole bunch of apps and notifications, which might help with this. But other than that, it's gonna be kind of tricky to automatically turn something on and off with different meetings. And so I would really love it if I, any of our listeners have got suggestions if they could share those with us so that we can share them back to you

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Mikah Sargent (01:08:54):
All right let's head into feedback in questions, and then we'll round things out with our app caps. Keith writes in hi, Mike and Rosemary. Wondering if you could do a session on I O devices on home kit and usability. I've been watching since Sarah Lane iPad today days and living in the UK. One of the few TWI shows I can watch live a long with Rosie. Oh my God. Along with Rosie, my spaniel. Hello, Rosie who is probably more knowledgeable than me, please keep up the good work kind regards Keith Keith. Oh my God. I, oh, I send us a photo of Rosie. I wanna see Rosie. Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard (01:09:31):
Yeah. We need the dog tax.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:32):
We do. We absolutely do. Yes. If you pay the dog tax. No, I'm kidding. We'll we'll, we'll put it on your tab. Cuz next week we are going to do a home kit episode. We're gonna talk about home kit automation. We're gonna talk about home kit devices that we have. We're gonna talk about sort of different ways that we make use of them. Rosemary is a perfect person to talk to about this in particular, because Rosemary's got a lot of special magic that she does. So I'm, I'm looking forward to that and let's move on to Jane's question. Well,

Rosemary Orchard (01:10:03):
I did just wanna say one thing quickly, which is if you've got a question about home kit, then email it in tweeted us, whatever you like so that we can include that in the answer to it in next week's show. As well, because we would love to on so all of your questions in, in one go. So yes, fingers crossed. We get a, a picture of Rosie sometimes soon.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:24):
Indeed. Jane writes in hi, Mike and Rosemary. I love your show and have listened to it. Faithfully. Since the beginning, I recently bought a new iPad pro 12.9 inch to replace my aging iPad. And I love it. Congrats as such a good device. I have discovered my Jo B iPad won't accommodate my new iPad. Is there a Mount you would recommend? I typically Mount it on a camera tripod. Also, I'm looking to find a good lighting solution for my video calls. I've looked at loom and El Gado. I sometimes use my oh Lumi cube for photo work on my iPhone. And I'm looking towards the El Gado with the eye towards an El Gado mini controller in the future. I have low vision. So the thought of having easier to read large buttons for lighting video and audio controls of interest, I would appreciate your thoughts about iPad, mounts and lighting as well as controllers Jane from Maine.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:11):
PS, my desktop OS is windows 10. I use my iPad pro for video conferences and other video work. Can I use a physical controller, like the, the stream deck with my iPad pro I use the iPad pro when doing video as my display one day, I'd like to use my iPhone as a video source to my iPad pro if possible. So there's a lot going on there. Some things that are possible, some things that what you can do is I, I absolutely recommend the the stream deck and the lights that El Gado makes. I have, in fact that is my lighting setup. I have what is it even called the, I, I can't remember, or what they, what they're called there. There it is. Thank you. Key lights. Yeah. So the Elga key lights I have them, they are incredibly bright.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:03):
They are, you can change the color temperature and they're pretty cost effective for what you get. You get some very nice I think they use Aram at LEDs inside and there are different versions now there's the key light, the key light air. And I think there's a mini or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it's called. Yeah, the key light mini and all of the different options are good options with incredible light for their size. The key light air is very bright as well. So I definitely recommend those. I'm curious Rosemary about your recommendations.

Rosemary Orchard (01:12:38):
Yeah. So specifically looking for mounts for the 12.9 inch IPA pro, I actually had two of them on episode 5 95. I had the mag float magnetic IPA pro stand where the 12.9 inch IPA pro just magnetizes onto it that might be worth looking into. And so I, I would recommend looking at that the 12.9 inch, you may struggle to find mounts that specifically fit on a tripod. So, but there are some on Amazon, unfortunately I am not in the us. So my Amazon links over here are not, they don't translate for the few things that I've tried over the years. So it might just be worth having a look and maybe trying and using Amazon's return policy, if it doesn't work out for you. The only thing that I will say is you are not going to be able to use your, your iPhone as an input for your iPad or an El GTO stream deck on the iPad at the very least at the moment that may change with I 16 or possibly 17, we don't know what the future holds for us yet.

Rosemary Orchard (01:13:40):
But right now ni it can't be used as an input or a controller on that device. So you are going to want to plug it into your windows machine to, to use it there. Though you can use your iPhone or iPad as video input on those windows machines, which might be worth looking into for that. And there's a couple of different options for that. Using things like OBS studios and so on, but it really depends on what you're trying to do as to whether or not you'll be easily able to accomplish it.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:14):
All right. With that it's time for rep caps, This is the part of the show where we wear caps a top our heads to honor our app picks app gadget picks of the week. These are the apps or gadgets we are using now that we want to share with all of you. Rosemary orchard. Tell us about the cap at top of your head, which is delightful. And then tell us about your app cap.

Rosemary Orchard (01:14:58):
Well, the cap at top of my head, I'm not sure it counts as a cap or as a hat. It's an umbrella with like a head fan on it. It's also the most uncomfortable hat in the world, so I'm probably not gonna be wearing it much longer past my app cap. But it is, you know, it's, it's kind of, it's got the different colors on there. It's got red, it's got yellow, it's got blue, it's got green. And I don't have to hold an umbrella whilst doing iOS today. So I'm gonna call that a win. And it was 2 99 on Amazon. So I'll called that a separate kind of win. And my app today is Soro for Sonos. So Soro for Sonos, the entire purpose of the app which is so the 19 nine in the app store is to add really good shortcut support for Sonos so that you can do things like change.

Rosemary Orchard (01:15:38):
For example, what's in the playlist on Sonos without having to use the Sonos app, which sometimes can be a little less than amazing for it. And that means that also, if you do things like put NFC tags around your house, then you can have your phone to something and then it will run whatever the shortcut is and Soro can control your Sonos. So if you look in the SOS at the Soro app, then it's got a couple of different example shortcuts that you can get. So for example, controlling the volume of specific speakers, playing favorites, browsing music, library, muting, skipping, RT mode et cetera. And then if we pop over to the shortcuts app, which is of course where all the magic happens, then we can see, oh my gosh, that is a humongous list of all of the different actions available to control Sonos via shortcuts through the so app.

Rosemary Orchard (01:16:32):
So for example, you, you can do things like set relative volume. You can load a queue, you can load music and favorites. You can group rooms together and ungroup rooms, which is something that you can't do so easily. Just, you know, well, you can do it manually through the, so the Sonos app, you're, you're gonna, if you've got certain groups that you create regularly and then BR break up, then that's not gonna be a, it's something that you're gonna want to do manually all the time. You can also get information. So for example, you can get current playback information, and this is really great, especially if you've got an older Sono system where you don't have airplay on all of your devices, but they're still great speakers. You don't wanna get rid of them. Well, Soro can hopefully come to the rescue and allow you to, you know, do things like clear your queue or get all your BA camp purchases, group rooms, play some music and generally control things in an automated, but fun fashion.

Rosemary Orchard (01:17:24):
You can also go completely nuts with this and integrate with something like widget pack to build your own custom widgets for Sonos. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing that, but it is pretty great to be able to set, for example, the TV sound settings via Sonos. Of course I don't actually have a Sonos soundbar sadly, but I do have some wool art, which is the Ikea sys woo art. And so I can you know, set that I can set night sound, I could set speech enhancement and I can choose whether or not I see the action when it runs. So basically this is a great app. It is not cheap, but also if you've already invested in the Sonos ecosystem and you do just want a way to automatically control Sonos through shortcuts, then it's a worthy investment

Mikah Sargent (01:18:09):
Now. Nice. All right. Definitely check that out. Today I am wearing a head wrap at top of my head. I do put whenever I do a deep conditioning treatment on my hair, I will typically put a head wrap of some sort on it's silk. And so it keeps my hair protected while I sleep. So I thought I would show a little of my purse a to life in my app cap for today. The app cap that I wanna talk about is one that folks may know about, but I wanted to mention it because it is there, there have been some new additions to the to the, the system. So this is duck, duck go privacy browser. And it is a browser that lets you surf the web while maintaining your privacy. It has a lot of different protections in place to keep your information from kind of being tracked across the web and including this button that is a kind of burn a all down button it says personal data can build up in your browser, yuck, use the fire button to burn it all away.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:16):
Give it a try. Now, when I tap that button, it completely clears all of the data that's been saved in with the browser and also the tabs that I've been to before. So now we'll go back to the site, although, oh, okay. There we go. One it back to the site. But the reason that I wanted to talk about this is actually two reasons it's available to download for free from the app store for your iPhone or your iPad. It is not on the Mac. The, the duck go privacy browser, or I should say it's not on the Mac right now. There is a Mac app in the works so that you can use the duck, duck go privacy browser on your Mac as well. It, there's currently a safari extension that you can install for duck, duck, go on your Mac, if you want to be able to have those privacy protections in place without the browser.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:08):
But I'm really pumped to see that duck doco is working on a browser for the Mac itself. And I signed up for the betas. Hopefully I can join that. The other thing that I wanted to mention though, is a really cool feature from duck doco called email protection and email protection is a lot like Apples masks, email service. And for folks who use one password along with fast mail, you may also be aware of the masked email services there. What it does is it lets you create kind of one time emails that are linked to specific to specific accounts. So what duck dot go is doing is they are serving as the way for you to create an email address and have that be linked to if I sign up for a new account and I'm worried about that company, spaming me, I can make sure that the only emails that ever get sent to that account are through that one email.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:12):
And that way I can just ditch that email if I'm tired of getting emails to that address. And it also means that I can hold these companies accountable. If they say, we're not gonna share your information with anyone. And suddenly I'm getting emails from a bunch of different places. So duck duck goes though protection service says we do not save your emails. Basically you have an email address for duck Duco, both for mask email, but also you can have one just that, that is sort of your official email. Mine is Mica duck.com, which is kind of fun. When we receive an email to a duck.com address, we immediately process it by removing the trackers and then forward it to, to its destination. This all happens in memory so that the emails are never written to disk. So the email goes to your duck.com email.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:57):
At that point, the trackers are removed from it and then it gets moved on, but it is volatile memory, meaning that as soon as that system is off, then it cannot be stored. When using the service, the only person in for information we save is your forwarding email address and the duck addresses you create. So Mikah ad dot.com, which forwards to my personal email, those are both saved obviously because they need to be able to process the email and get it sent to the right place. We do not use your personal information for any purpose, unrelated to this service. So they don't sell your information and they only disclose information if they are legally forced to do so. And in that case, they will go to court to fight against those disclosures. They do not use third party email services to forward your email.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:37):
That means that they themselves are in control of that. They're not pawning that off on someone else. And again, because that stuff is stored in in volatile memory, it's kind of hard for any of that at stuff to be kind of pulled from their systems as well. If you decide to delete your accounts, you can do that and they will delete it immediately and remove everything. And what I love too, is that duck doco always puts in their sort of terms and services. Hey, even if this company is owned by another company, we will not, we will rather die than to let that company sort of, sort of change the way that we consider your privacy protections. So I think the email protection thing is very cool. And for folks on Andrew duck doco has a special thing built into its duck doco browser there that will do a lot of the app privacy protection stuff on Apples system, but instead on Android, so love duck, doco love what they do.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:41):
Email protection is something worth signing up for a check out. So any emails that get sent to Mikah, duck.com, they pull all of the trackers out of the email before it gets forwarded along to my email, which is very handy and make sure that I am, you know, staying safe in that way. And then also looking forward to checking out the Mac app, but until then you can always download it on your iPhone and your add, all right, folks that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS today. If you have questions, feedback, et cetera, as we mentioned, or dog tax to file iOS today@twi.tv tax day, I think is Monday. So get your dog tax in before that watch live. If you'd like by going to TWI TV slash live every Tuesday at 12:00 PM, Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:31):
So you can join us and enjoy the show there. Or you can subscribe to the show by going to twi.tv/ios and clicking to subscribe. You can subscribe to the audio version of the show or the video version of the show, but that's a great place for you to head in order to sign up for the on Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify, et cetera. I need to remove that voicemail option there. That's, that's not a thing at all anymore. And we thank you all for writing in your feedback for subscribing to the show. If you want all of our shows ad free there is a way to do that. You can check out club TWI for seven bucks a month. You get every single TWI show add free. Yes. all the TWI shows all add free.

Mikah Sargent (01:25:16):
You get access to the members only TWI plus bonus fee that has extra content. You won't find anywhere else, including I believe a recent AMA with Paul thera one with our web engineer, Patrick de, and more to come soon and access to the members only discord server. That's the place where you can go to chat with your fellow club, TWI members, but also those of us here at TWI, it's a great place to sort of have a you know, personal conversations with TWI hosts and, and producers and, and all sorts of folks there. And then your fellow club, TWI members, ah, it's so nice. Twi.Tv/Club TWI seven bucks a month. And you'll of course will be supporting us directly, which is even more awesome. And we heard that some folks wanted to support their favorite shows directly. And weren't kind of concerned about all the, the extra stuff. If you use Apple podcasts, you can type in iOS today, find the audio version of the feed and subscribe for 2 99 a month. When you subscribe, you will get an ad free version of the audio feed. So that's a great way to support us too. Rosemary orchard. If folks wanna follow you online and check out all your great work, where do they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard (01:26:22):
Their best place to go is Rosemary orchard.com, which has links to all the things I do online, including the other podcasts, which some of the people writing kindly mentioned today. And of course you can find me on Twitter at Rosemary orchard. And if you're a club trip member, you can frequently find me in the club, TWI disc court channel for iOS today, where I'm always lurking. And we've had some pretty good discussions there. Recently. Some people be about air tags on pets, things like that. It's a nice place to hang out. Where can people find you? Mikah?

Mikah Sargent (01:26:48):
You can find me at Mica Sergeant on many, a social media network or head to chihuahua.coffee. That's ch I HOA hoa.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active on online. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for, for are checking out the show each and every week for joining us here for iOS today. I hope you found some new fun games to play, or you thought of some things you want to ask us. We're always happy to answer those until next week. We will see you then. Yes, that works. Goodbye.

Ant Pruitt (01:27:19):
Did you spend a lot of money on your brand new smartphone? And then you look at the pictures is on Facebook and Instagram, and you're like, what in the world happened to that photo? Yes, you have. I know it happens to all of us. Well, you need to check out my show hands on photography, where I'm going to walk you through simple tips and tricks that are gonna help make you get the most out of your smartphone camera or your D SLR or mirrorless, whatever you have. And those shots are gonna look so much better. I promise you, so make sure you're tuning into twit TV slash hop for hands on photography to find out more.